This course will expose attendees to a holistic overview of environments within buildings and highlight some of the impacts of these environments. Building on robust scientific principles of fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and the biochemistry of indoor air attendees will be led through considerations of the impacts on energy consumption, thermal comfort, indoor air exposures, disease transmission, and ultimately reflect on linkages to human health, well-being, and productivity. The summer school will comprise of five inter-connected lecture courses. An introduction to urban fluid mechanics will consider the dynamics of flows around buildings, including pollutant sources and dispersion. The thermal performance of buildings and their energy usage will be considered with a focus on human comfort and performance. How we might ventilate our buildings effectively and using less energy will consider passive strategies and the resulting fluid dynamics. This will be linked to the pollutants we face indoors and our exposures thereto. Finally, solutions for assessing and mitigating the health, productivity, and well-being impacts of buildings will be presented.
Details of the topics covered within the summer school include atmospheric boundary layers and the stability thereof. Introduction to airflows into, and around, urban environments, alongside the impacts of a changing climate and urban heat islands, and mitigation measures will be discussed. Urban pollution sources, and dispersion models, will be introduced. Moving indoors, heat transfer within buildings and the thermo-physiology of humans will be presented in the context of thermal comfort. Links between the indoor environment quality and performance will be evidenced, alongside discussion of measurement methodologies. Heat, moisture, and pollutant balances will be developed to model indoor conditions and inform mitigations, including ventilation and air cleaning. The importance of psychrometrics and radiant heat transfer in buildings will be established. The forcing of ventilation flows by natural means will be discussed, and studies of single rooms will be linked to building network flow analysis. The importance of flows with room for the human experience will be emphasised and linked to the role of pointwise monitoring of conditions within rooms. Selected low-energy ventilation and heating/cooling strategies, and associated technologies, will be described. Indoor air pollution, and its implications, will be discussed including both particulate and gaseous pollutants and the transmission of infectious disease. The learning from large-scale studies of indoor air quality will be highlighted. The evidence for health impacts of indoor environments will be introduced, and evidence for infection transmission discussed. Exposure risk models will be presented alongside the practicalities of their deployment. Current topics, and future issues associated with indoor air quality and human exposure will be presented and discussed.